The Gdansk Shipyard Agreement: Solidarity Is Born, 1980
1980 · event
On 31 August 1980, in a hall of the Lenin Shipyard in Gdansk, a government delegation and a committee of workers signed an agreement that included the right to form trade unions independent of the state. Nothing like it existed anywhere in the Soviet bloc. The strike that produced it had begun two weeks earlier over the dismissal of a crane operator, Anna Walentynowicz, who was months away from her pension and had been active in the free trade union movement.
Workers occupied the yard rather than marching, which gave them a place to hold and made violent clearance politically costly. An electrician named Lech Walesa climbed the fence to join them. When the yard's own demands were met, the strikers stayed out in support of smaller workplaces that had joined them, and an inter enterprise committee drew up twenty one demands, written on wooden boards that now sit in a museum. They included free unions, the right to strike, freedom of speech, the release of political prisoners and the broadcasting of Mass on Sunday.
The union that followed took the name Solidarnosc and within a year had close to ten million members in a country of thirty five million. Martial law was declared in December 1981, the union was banned and its leaders interned, and it continued underground for the rest of the decade, printed on hidden presses and supported from the churches.
In 1989 the same government sat down with the same movement at a round table, and the partly free election that followed swept the opposition into parliament. Poland was the first country of the bloc to change its system, and the sequence that ended in Berlin in November began at a shipyard gate. Walesa became president in 1990, and the gate itself is now the centrepiece of a museum.